The present invention relates generally to the field of food preparation, and in particular to a new and useful process for aging meat that allows the meat to be aged for a longer period to enhance its tenderness and flavor, while avoiding excessive spoilage and waste.
The subject inventor, David Burke, is a renowned master chef and food innovator who has introduced various unique concepts to American cooking. A small sampling can be found at the inventor's website.
One of the inventor's techniques uses bricks of Himalayan salt in a climate-controlled aging room in his restaurant in Chicago, Ill., “David Burke's PrimeHouse,” for dry-aging meats, in particular beef, for as long as 35 days. Aging breaks out enzymes in the meat and makes it more flavorful and tender. Unlike wet-aging, where the pieces of meat are sealed in a plastic wrapping and aged from the inside out in a short period of a few days at most, the far more expensive dry-aging process exposes the surface of the meat to the atmosphere in an aging room and aging occurs from the outside in. Dry-aging generally takes from two to four weeks but the tangy flavor is enhanced even further by aging for 35 days, if possible. Aging periods of longer than 35 days, however, have been considered to be impractical since a piece of meat aged for so long would be expected to be unusable.
The inventor's prior Chicago aging room utilizes a plastic rack that carries an ordered stack of bricks of Himalayan salt. Each brick has an average height of about 2 inches, an average width of about 4 inches, an average length of about 8 inches and an average weight of about 3.10 pounds. There are 153 bricks in the stack for an initial total weight of 474.3 pounds of salt in the room. The bricks are in an orderly arrangement of rows that are stacked row-upon-row in one layer of bricks on the plastic rack. The bricks in each row are off set to the side by one half a brick length with respect to the next row, in the same way that bricks are stacked in a conventional brick wall, but the bricks are not adhered to each other, but simply stay in place by gravity. Although eventually the bricks fuse together randomly due to moisture in the room, the stack of bricks is tilted back in its salt rack against the wall of the room to help prevent upsetting the stack of salt bricks, for example, while meat pieces are being loaded onto meat racks in the room, or unloaded from the meat racks after aging.
Other parameters of the inventor's prior Chicago process are listed later in this disclosure for better comparison to the parameters of the inventor's improved aging process that is disclosed and claimed here.
As dry aging progresses the outer surface of the meat becomes discolored and hard and must eventually be removed to expose the usable, flavorful core. Accordingly cost increases even further due both to the long time needed for the dry-aging process, and also due to the large amount of weight loss between the original piece of meat and the remaining usable cut that has lost moisture and also lost its outer hard covering.
A need remains for improving the dry-aging process even further, for allowing longer aging periods while minimizing weight loss as far as possible. The invention that is disclosed and claimed below, has been discovered as a result of experimentation and experience on the part of the inventor. Those with ordinary skill in the culinary arts would have no reasonable expectation of success or anticipate success by practicing the invention, from what is already known in the art, before reading this disclosure.